Tracking my progress in Texas Hold'em
Published on July 10, 2006 By PacDragon In Gaming
Well, the buzz from my WSOP adventures is starting to wear off. Work can do that. I played some cash games for the rest of my stay, winning a decent amount in each game. Man, Vegas is great for low-stakes poker. Sooo many tourists sitting down to try the game out.

My wife got pretty sick for the last half of the week, so we didn't do much besides hang out in the time share. She had to be hospitalized the day before we left, and then again when we got here. But she's all better now and the baby is healthy. (It's going to be a boy, by the way.)

Lately, I've pretty much been playing two games: the $50 NL cash game on Party Poker and the $22 Party Poker tournament with $40k guaranteed. The cash game is fun, I pretty much just use it to kill time. I do a lot of hit & runs in that game. I've lost my buy-in about three times so far, but I've more than covered that with my winnings. The tournament is a different story, I've never done much better than squeak into the money. But it nearly always has over 2000+ players and I'm trying to get better at fighting through those big fields. The top prize is usually over $10k, so just winning it once will be HUGE for my bankroll.

San Pablo went all right this week, I suppose. I won $140 at $3/$6, but got busted out of the tournament in the first round. I really need to work on tuning my aggression. I had a good run of cards in the beginning, but did a lot of raise/folding with them on scary flops. Then I got overaggressive with 99 and lost to KQ. I bet the flop, despite there being a queen, and then called when my opponent re-raised all-in. All the folding I was doing earlier was hurting my starting stack, so I either wanted to double up on a bluff or just go out. It was a mistake for sure and I completely misread my opponent.

I'm starting to hear some murmurs about a new direction that poker theory is moving towards. Mostly, using financial theory to help you decide which games you should be playing. You pretty much treat your various games as portfolios, each with a certain risk vs. reward. Financial analysts already have tools to help them decide an optimal set of investments to pursue, based on how much risk they're willing to assume. Theoretically, you should be able to quantify each of your games into an investment and plot what range of games would be best for your bankroll (using your previous stats). I already have a nebulous idea of how I should be doing it, so I wonder if there are some financial tools out there that would help me come to more accurate decisions? Something to think about.

Comments
on Jul 11, 2006
For those who are interested, this is the article that got me thinking about finance theory:

http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/current/mezick0706.html